Windows XP crashes to a BSOD (blue screen of death) during startup as a guest OS. It happens fairly often. So much so that if I must close Windows, I select "Save Machine State" instead of a normal shutdown. The only time I choose shutdown is when there is no choice (a new program installation, windows updates, etc.).

Sometimes just attempting to start again is enough to get Windows past whatever the problem is and it starts normally. Other times I must boot to Safe Mode, login/logout of an admin account, and restart. That usually works, though not always.

Hmm. Well, we get these BSODs quite predictably. They appear to be related to how, or when, the Guest Additions are loaded. If the mouse icon becomes active, I know that Windows will continue to boot; otherwise it BSODs.

I followed the instructions for creating a minidump; I did this in a root account in Safe Mode. I even created the <Minidump> directory since there was none.

No dumps were ever created after a BSOD. I tried this on multiple computers.

More information:

We currently have six workstations running almost the same hardware. They all have the same motherboard (asus m3a78-em), CPU (amd athlon am2 5200), and memory (4GB). The difference in hardware is the disk drive complement. Most have some form of SATA drive running at 7200 rpm; two stations have 10K or 15K rpm SCSI drives.

I mention this because one station WILL NOT start the winXP VM for VBox version 3.2.4. (I have reverted that one to v3.1.6 which does start the VM.) It BSODs without fail. No crash dump was ever produced. That system has a 10K rpm SCSI drive. I have upgraded the other systems to v3.2.4 and get only a couple of BSODs before the VM finally starts.

I had the "opportunity" to try this a couple of weeks ago. I had managed to damage the video drivers in such a way that VBox would crash it video acceleration was enabled. It made no difference to the BSOD problem. (I have subsequently fixed the video issue and now have acceleration enabled again.)

check if using one CPU makes any difference

Yes, it does! The computer that BSOD'd yesterday without exception at v3.2.6 now starts cleanly with only a single CPU allowed.